Understanding Clients

There are loads of different types of clients out there and chances are at some point you'll get to meet all of them. So let's take a look through some typical clients and see if you recognise a few of your own in there!

If a client says he wants his new auction site to be "like eBay," what does that mean? An artist hears "It has a tacky color scheme." A developer hears "It's scalable to 20 million users." A user hears "It has feedback ratings on all sellers."

Without a problem, there is no project. Where there is a problem, however, there is a stakeholder who is desperate for a solution and who has a delivery deadline. Find out how a good process can tame even the most unruly project.

One of the biggest problems in delivering a website, and yet probably the least talked and written about, is how to decide, specify, and communicate just what, exactly, is it that we're going to build, and why.

When used at critical points in the design process, these sessions build strong, respectful relationships. Since clients directly experience the design work, you don't need to sell clients on an idea — they were with you the whole time.

Scope creep distorts our carefully structured schedules, making project managers weep. Have we run out of strategies for fighting this evil scourge? Is it hopeless? Maybe not. Maybe it can even be beneficial.

The basic principles of collaborative web development: identifying stakeholders, recognizing the "Chaos Zone," distinguishing the development and production phases of operation, identifying source assets, building direct feedback into work processes, and more.

Difficult Clients

There is no magic bullet to turn your difficult clients into dream clients. However, you can learn new skills that will make them much easier to work with, so you can be spending your time delivering service and products.

The use of tables is now actually interfering with building a better, more accessible, flexible, and functional Web. Find out where the problems stem from, and learn solutions to create transitional or completely table-less layout.

Building Web sites with modern standards-based techniques can reduce bandwidth costs, enhance accessibility, and facilitate content management. This article prompts you to ask whether your Web techniques are stuck in the 1990s.

I'm impressed by how many of these articles you've already read. A lot of them were new to me. It was also good to have a refresh on some of the others — there's a lot of good stuff out there about working with clients and stakeholders.